The novel opens in its initial chapters with two seemingly parallel storylines.
On the one hand, it recounts the most pivotal episodes in the life of an adolescent, his circle of friends, and his neighborhood in Porto Alegre.
The boy perpetually courts risk, yet fails to display genuine courage: thus, he does not come to the aid of a friend who is murdered by a rival gang.
There emerges in the boy a propensity to pursue adventure and a superhero’s existence within the realm of fantasy, to the point of inflicting wounds on himself and causing self-harm merely to prove that he is capable of enduring pain and that he has lived through extraordinary trials.
On the other hand, there is a successful plastic surgeon about to set off to conquer an unclimbed peak with a mountaineering friend.
On his way to pick up his friend, he returns to his old neighborhood, and we come to realize that the surgeon is none other than that same adolescent grown into adulthood.
Adolescent memories then resurface: he gets involved in a street fight to save a boy, encounters once again a female friend with whom he had shared his childhood fantasies, and realizes that “living, on the other hand, had nothing heroic about it.”
He had lived

in a permanent limbo between innocence and heroism, inhabited by phantasmagoric projections of himself, slightly distorted by what he would have liked to have been in the past or become in the future

.
He has finally become an adult.
The novel tackles several themes.
The first of these is the pursuit of life’s authenticity—that is, of a life genuinely lived—solely through extraordinary feats meant to highlight one's courage and virility.
One does not truly live unless one is a superhero.

They are boys living at the pinnacle of the human illusion of invincibility, seduced by the opportunity to put their physical vigor to the test and avenge the cosmic injustice of being born

.
The blatant falsity of this worldview surfaces only when the protagonist lacks the courage to help his friend, thus failing to demonstrate the true capacity to be a man.
The dominant theme of the book, however, is the relationship with one’s own body and the process of alienation through which, from being protagonists, we become spectators of ourselves, as if at the cinema.
The protagonist perceives the reality of his own feelings only if they translate into a physical alteration of the body.
This initiation begins in childhood when, standing before the bathroom mirror at home, he uses felt-tip pens to simulate blood and wounds on his body; it unfolds through genuine accidents, sought out precisely to hurt himself, and culminates in his professional calling: becoming a plastic surgeon.
Just as at the moment of initiation, the protagonist sees himself as a spectator watching a film.

C’è sangue sul suo volto, una ferita terribile all’occhio, un’altra al braccio, e lui che si trascina fuori dal veicolo sulla sabbia bollente, la sabbia che si incolla al suo sangue, gli spettatori correvano a prestare soccorso all’eroe del film.
Il suo film.
La scena rasentava la perfezione.
Il trucco non avrebbe potuto essere più realistico.
Che bella cosa il sangue, pensò prima di svenire

Lui iniziò a vedere la cosa dall’esterno, come una telecamera piazzata sul soffitto.
La maledetta telecamera che era la sua unica amante.
A volte la telecamera spuntava fuori negli istanti cruciali della sua esistenza: era come se lui stesso, si staccasse dal corpo per diventare l’osservatore.
C’era lui dietro alla telecamera, che usciva di scena, attraversava la membrana tra realtà e fantasia e sceglieva una sedia nella platea vuota di un cinema buio

.
The novel is thoroughly engaging.
The prose ranges from a neo-modernist style (long, winding periods, bordering on soliloquies) to succinct, remarkably effective dialogue.
The depiction of the settings and characters proves equally incisive.

Dreams at dawn of the urban cyclist